Sunday, August 9, 2015

Sunday Sermon [The Hiroshima Maidens]

Hola mi Gente...

August 7th is the anniversary of one the most horrible atrocities in human history: the
dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I first came to know
the truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki when I returned to school and discovered
the Hiroshima Maidens…

* * *

The Tree of
the Knowledge of good and Evil/ Hiroshima Maidens

60"x80"
Oil on Canvass/ Wood, 2003

The
central image of this painting is a representation of the tree of the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The side panels are taken from displays in the
Hiroshima Peace Museum showing the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of that
city.

The Hiroshima Maidens

The
Hiroshima Maidens is a group of twenty-five Japanese women who were seriously
disfigured as young women as a result of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima on
the morning of August 6, 1945. They have dedicated their lives to telling the
story of the Hiroshima bombings and the horror of nuclear war.

My
curiosity piqued after listening to their talk while I was in college, I
investigated further and what I discovered wasn’t pretty, to say the least.

The
accepted rationale for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that if the atomic bomb had
not been dropped, the war would have continued and more lives would have been
lost. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Many
nations have tested nuclear weapons, but only one has ever used them. That
nation, of course, is the United States; the bombs it dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August, 1945 incinerated more than 100,000 residents and left
perhaps twice that number dying slowly from radiation poisoning. However,
politicians at the time and conventional historians still maintain that those
acts were justified. Short of a full-scale invasion of Japan, its leaders would
not have been convinced to surrender, and that, the reasoning goes, would have
resulted in an even higher death toll.

How
many lives would have been lost in such an invasion is not clear. While
President Truman threw around figures from 500,000-one million dead, at least
one historian wrote that the figures the military planners projected put the
number at between 20,000-46,000. However, the disturbing issue here is not the
discrepancy in numbers, but the fact that neither an invasion nor a nuclear
attack was necessary to make Japan surrender.

By
June 1945, whole-scale bombing of Japan’s six largest cities had substantially
wiped out Japan’s infrastructure and countless lives. In March of that year, as
many as 1 million Tokyo residents were left homeless from the bombing raids. No
oil shipments were getting into the country, which was utterly dependent on
foreign oil, and by late that July 90% of Japanese merchant shipping had been
destroyed.

While
it is true that some Japanese factions were resisting the notion of surrender,
the leaders in charge were on the verge of calling it quits. The only point
deterring surrender was the Japanese concern that the emperor would be allowed
to maintain his title. The US forces, of course, eventually accepted this condition.

A
US government report issued in 1946 concluded that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
bombs did cause a Japanese surrender. The report cited documentation that as
early as May 1945, Japanese leaders had decided that the war be ended even if
it meant complete acceptance of Allied terms. The document cites the
conclusion that Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not
been dropped and even if no invasion had been planned or completed.

Another
1946 document, a recently discovered secret intelligence study by the army’s
top planning and operations group, came to the same conclusion: an invasion
“would not have been necessary” and the A-bomb was not decisive in ending the
war.

This
view wasn’t some radical lefty bullshit; key military leaders echoed it. “The
Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender… In being the first to
use [the atomic bomb] we had adopted an ethical standard common to the
barbarians of the Dark Ages,” said William D. Leahy, who was the president’s
Chief of Staff and the nation’s senior military officer. The same opinion was
offered by Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill.

This
isn’t hindsight, these assessments were known by US policy makers before
they chose to drop the bombs. In fact, in July, American intelligence had
intercepted a cable from Japanese foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to his
ambassador in Moscow that referred to “His Majesty’s strong desire to secure a
termination of the war… ”

There
was no attempt on behalf of the Truman administration to demand surrender. No
show of power by, say, dropping the bomb on an unpopulated island. There was no
careful consideration. This wasn’t the act of last resort. So, if there was no
true imperative to drop the bombs then why?

There
are several theories, but the one I adhere to is that the US was about enter an
unprecedented position of leadership in most of the post-war world and a
demonstration of nuclear might was intended more for the Soviets than anything
else. It was a show of power to the Soviets, a nation the military feared. In
fact, that the second bomb was made from plutonium, and not uranium as the
first one, suggests that the Japanese people were the subject of a gruesome
scientific experiment. The bombs were more of an opening shot in a Cold War
that would last for decades.

I
write all this because we should never forget... We all should know all those
innocent men, women, and children didn’t need to die, as those in power would
have us believe.

My
name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Resources

Alperovitz,
G. (1995) The decision to use the atomic bomb and the architecture of an
American myth. (New York: Knopf) [link]

Zinn,
H. (1991). A people's history of the United States: 1492-present. New York:
Perennial Classics. [link]

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My life experiences have led me to strive to help others move their lives in a positive direction, exploring opportunities that would otherwise be closed to them. I like to think I sit at the crossroads of the dialectic between knowledge and action. I hope that what transpires here is reflective of my beliefs.